


Hey Nostradamus!

by calvincandy (marroniere_m)



Category: Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: AU, Angst, Canon Backstory, Captured!Q, Creepy Silva is creepy, Double Agents, Emotional Baggage, First Person Perspective, I am not good at writing summaries, M/M, Mentions of Violence, Q can sometimes be a bit arrogant, Romance, Silva finds Q first
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-16
Updated: 2013-04-28
Packaged: 2017-12-08 16:47:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/763698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marroniere_m/pseuds/calvincandy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Silva is the first person to find Q and make use of his skills. Few years later, Q joins MI-6, but once you start working for Silva, there is, in fact, no way back. When Q meets Bond, things get even more messed up and complicated.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_I believe that what separates humanity from everything else in this world - spaghetti, binder paper, deep-sea creatures, edelweiss and Mount McKinley - is that humanity alone has the capacity at any given moment to commit all possible sins. Even those of us who try to live a good and true life remain as far away from grace as the Hillside Strangler or any demon who ever tried to poison the village well._

_Douglas Coupland_

The barrel of James’ gun is pressed against my chest. I recognise the Walther even in the dark: I remember installing the sensors, the tiny self-destruct mechanism and the sat nav tracker, and repairing everything after the Yemen affair.  
James looks as if he has had no sleep at night, as though he had put on ten years in a couple of days – his cheeks look sunken, and I’ve never seen such big bags under his eyes. Not even when we slept one hour a day. Not even when he had no sleep in two days, guzzling down black coffee and gulping painkillers by handfuls, rebandaging the gunshot wound in his shoulder every few hours. It was in Afghanistan; that is to say, James was in Afghanistan, and I was calling him from London – telling him that there was no way he would get blood poisoning and that the reinforcements were on the way. It’s not that James ever needed support – but that was the only thing I could do for him as he was stuck in the dead end, dressing his wound with a hanky or with a torn-off shirt sleeve.  
James is looking at me, as though to ask why the hell, why the bloody hell I betrayed MI6, betrayed M, betrayed him? But he is silent; I know him too well to be surprised at that, but all the same, his silence makes me want to shrink, curl up like an embryo, or a prawn in a salad, to grow into the goddamn wall and stay there.  
The top floor is cordoned off. The guys from my department have already been arrested and escorted out. They will be interrogated thoroughly, for several days – and, as it goes, somebody will confess to a few peccadillos (with no relation whatsoever to me, or to what happened in the last few weeks), and somebody else will have a confession wrested out of them.  
Even through the fabric of my shirt, the metal is cold against my skin.  
“Listen,” I say to James. “I wasn’t lying to you.”  
He is still silent.  
The new MI6 office smells like dampness, fresh paint and plastic, as if Churchill’s bunker was at least a few hundred miles from here, all the way across the Channel. By the way, if I had tried to hide in the bunker, James would have found me there, too. James always finds me, no matter where I hide. Had I fled to Barcelona, or Budapest – or even to the other end of the world, say, to Australia – they would have had no trouble tracking me. I could cover my tracks and win a week’s delay, but that would be it. The way it was, all my careful, meticulous planning had gone down the drain.  
James narrows his eyes – they still have that certain intensity, but all the fire is gone. I would ask him to shoot, but I don’t. I gulp uneasily.  
“Let’s be honest,” I continue. “I really wasn’t lying. I was just holding things back.”  
I shift my gaze away from the Walther, to James’ face, pale and waxy, then back to the gun in his hand, and see it tremble.

They are walking me along the corridors, giving me now a push now a shove. Mallory is not an idiot – he wouldn’t keep a former agent in a chamber at the HQ. I’m probably in Wales now, or somewhere near. I know of five secret detention facilities, but there might as well be a dozen, or two dozen.  
I trip, and promptly get hit in the face; blood trails down from my nostrils, warm and sticky. Unable to wipe it off, I lick the blood off my lips. Naked light bulbs on the ceiling give no light at all; it feels like I’m making my way through a haunted house in a goddamn amusement park. This place could use a few papier-mâché mummies and a tiny cart.  
My cell looks a bit like Silva’s – the same glass cube, the same chair. Only the glass is thinner – I notice that as I tap it with my finger.  
I have to sleep sitting up.

The first time Detective Agron visits me, I keep silent.  
“Quentin Boothroyd,” he says, “codename Q, born in 1985, head of MI-6 Technical Department.”  
“I will talk only to James Bond,” I reply.  
“No,” he shakes his head. “You will talk either way.”  
I look up at the ceiling. My eyes are smarting from the bright yellow light.

Agron talks about capital punishment.  
“I wholeheartedly agree,” I nod with a smirk.  
I’m not good at imitating Silva.  
Every investigator is a keen psychologist – Agron sees through my clownery. He would have liked to punish me for treachery, for M’s death, for hacking the security system, and everything else. I would like to punish myself for James, and for all that mess. Everything else was collateral.  
“What do you know about Raoul Silva?” he asks.  
“I will talk only to James Bond,” I reply yet again.  
Agron watches me intently.  
“Bond wasn’t hired to be your lawyer.”

Sometimes – when the pain in my chest becomes so sharp that it feels like my ribcage is about to rip open, explode with shards of bone and chunks of flesh, when I’m scraping dried blood off my lips and nostrils, when I can’t fall asleep in my chair – I think of James, and of what was, and what will be. Once I even see him in my dream: he comes here, still pale, and I have nothing in particular to tell him.  
“I’m sorry,” I mutter, pressing my fingers to the glass.  
He says something in response, but I can’t hear anything through the walls of my cube. Tearing my nails and not noticing it, I’m scratching the glass, as though to spell: “Silva”, or “stupid”, or “shame”. James watches me for a while, then leaves. He doesn’t even have to frown for me to understand everything. He made the same face at the National Gallery, when I shook his hand and said: “007, I’m your new Quartermaster.”  
As I wake up in my chair, I find myself squinting in the yellow light and wishing I had dreamt of something else - The Big Bang Theory, or maybe Jeeves and Wooster. Even Little Britain would do.

You can tolerate any kind of pain, you know; it’s just a matter of patience and the ability to abstract away. You can try to forget about bruises, abrasions, smashed lips, broken ribs, and the constant taste of blood in your mouth. Even about the dull ache in your swollen wrist. But the chill permeating your body, the gnawing emptiness somewhere inside your chest, the dozens of scenarios of what you could have said if they had given you a chance to justify yourself – these things are a lot worse than pain.  
If Silva had seen me now, he would have brought up Nietzsche. Damned if I know why. When in a good mood, he would always bring up Nietzsche and Dale Carnegie. To tell the truth, Silva had really bad taste. He always had a thing for shitty books, shitty plans, and dragging everybody into shitty situations.  
The tragedy and idiocy of my situation is that I had let him drag me into all the shit there was.  
“Carnegie scares me,” I once told him.  
“But why?” Silva asked.  
Grinning from ear to ear, he looked like a clay idol in a wig.  
I said:  
“It’s easy to be a darling.”  
When Silva was being a darling, it was like Fukushima, or Hiroshima, or the Titanic crashing into the Costa Concordia. James, on the other hand, never even bothered with that. Moneypenny thought he was awfully strange, Mallory deemed him a fucking sociopath; as for James himself – he would say to me:  
“Learn to save time.”  
Here I have plenty of time, so I’ll try to tell the whole story – from the beginning to the end.


	2. Chapter 2

Everyone – or at least anyone with half-a-brain – grows up with the sense of exceptionality. Every one of us child prodigies had a father who wanted us to be like Stephen Hawking, or a mother who saw us as the new Tony Blair. My parents thought I was destined to become a great mathematician, like that Russian who proved the Poincaré conjecture and locked himself up in his flat after. The school psychologist spoke of incredibly high intelligence; teachers nodded in agreement, though I hated English, Latin and History with a passion. Maths was something that observed intelligible laws. After all, I was the ten-year-old Quentin Boothroyd, so assured of my genius.  
My father taught Particle Physics at Oxford; my mother cooked slightly burnt breakfasts, straightened her hair, painted her lips a bold shade of red, and reproached him for ruining her career. What she actually wanted to do, I never knew. Father said they had met at a student demonstration in ’66 – that’s the only thing I remember of what he told me. They were protesting against the war in Vietnam, waged by Americans hundreds of miles away from Britain.  
If you don’t filter excess information, you’ll simply go mad.  
I can’t say I was hated at school; the right word would be unnoticed. Do you know what a black hole is? I mean, a physicist would say that a black hole is a thing with such strong attracting force that even objects moving at light speed can’t overcome it. But me, I was an empty space, until somebody wanted to copy my homework. I was studying hard, stealing huge jars of cookies from the kitchen, reading Tolkien, because I didn’t like anything else at the time, listening to my parents’ quarrels, and dreaming when I was in a good mood.  
When I was thirteen, I thought I was surrounded by idiots.  
My parents were right in the middle of a divorce; my mother finally had to find a job to pay for my public school. It was then that I found out that because of my father, she had to leave her job as a political columnist.  
When I was seventeen, nothing had changed.  
I lost my virginity with a classmate’s sister – her name was Janice, like Janice Rand from Star Trek – on her bed, under the posters that said Green Day and Lostprophets. The Green Day frontman was looking at me through all the eyeliner, as if judging me, and Janice almost ripped a tuft of my hair out. Then I was standing in the shower, tired, with my knees weak and the ice-cold water hitting me in the face.  
“Is everything all right?” Janice asked.  
“Never been better,” I forced a smile and brushed a drop of water off my nose.  
Janice stood in the doorway for a few seconds, looking at me confusedly, then threw my clothes at me and left.  
As it turned out, sex was a great source of inspiration for programming. At the time I was participating in a student conference at Oxford – I was working on a neural network-based system for predicting stock market trends. I was lucky: they turned a blind eye to the fact that I hadn't even finished school.  
I didn’t leave the house for three days on end: I would order pizza and Chinese food, wander about the empty rooms sporting pyjama pants, make one cup of coffee after the other (one with cinnamon, one with milk, one black) – and I was writing the code, only taking breaks when I couldn’t collect my thoughts. I gave no response to my mother’s questions. I guess that was when she understood that I had disappointed her/was a disappointment.  
She would come into my room, sit down on the bed and talk about how worthwhile it was to communicate with people, and how the outer world was important too.  
I was seventeen, and I thought I had the right to tell people to bugger off.  
Two months later I received a government grant, and the Guardian mentioned me as a future luminary in science – in but a few paragraphs, but with enough sugar to cause diabetes.  
I still attended lectures from time to time, but I was already fed up with school. I still spent most of the time inside my room. I sat in front of my computer round the clock, in my pyjamas, with a cup of coffee at hand. Speaking of pyjamas: I had at least one at any given time of my life, though I didn’t like them all that much. I threw them out, thinking that they made me look like a complete dolt, but my exes and friends (for lack of a better word) never failed to give me one or two for Birthday or Christmas. In the end I started piling them in a convenient place so that I never had to think about what to wear at home. I think that was when my mother lost all hope.  
At nineteen I was studying programming at Oxford, still having a tedious time, still eating fast food and staying up all night; that was what everybody expected from me. Though I did have to replace coffee with tea: the university doctor said he was worried about my nerves.  
I bumped into my father once or twice; he had turned grey and lost weight. I kept silent, he kept silent, we made awkward eye contact and pretended not to know each other.  
I could get a job at Apple – working on Siri and its voice recognition module and meeting Steve Jobs three or four times a week, up to his death, pretending that I was happy with my salary and that I enjoyed making toys for hipsters and white collars. I could go to Microsoft, but there the prospects were even more limited. I could be a scholar, write books, conduct researches, and finally turn into a dull professor revered by the department as if he were Norbert Wiener. But you know that: I haven’t become a scholar or a Silicon Valley guy who makes the iPads you’re using to check your e-mail and Facebook every morning. I’ve become what I’ve become. So I’m sitting here and not at my office, and instead of a mixed anxiety-depressive disorder I have a split lip and a metallic taste in my mouth.  
The thing is, I’ve never liked to squander my talents on trifles. There will always be a thousand equally boring options, and when you reject these, a truly worthwhile one will turn up.  
You say: MI-6.  
I say: I met Raul Silva long before that.


	3. Chapter 3

When I’m recollecting this story, I find it quite amusing. If you know Silva, you will probably think that it started with him putting a severed head on my bed, or strapping me with explosives and locking in the cellar at Harvey Nichols with ten minutes to get out. But that wasn’t the case. There was a different sense of humour, not sophisticated enough for Monty Python and not black enough for Simon Pegg comedies. In terms of absurdity, our first acquaintance was on a level with Family Guy. Later Silva told me that he had managed to go without killing anybody just because he hadn’t wanted to scare me. I prefer to believe that he simply was less crazy then.  
It began with series of strange messages: first via e-mail, then texts, then actual paper letters crammed into my mailbox. There were so many that in the end whoever delivered them was just dumping them on the doormat in front of the flat I was renting with a friend. At seven o’clock I jumped out of my bed, sleepy and tousled, to find a hundred envelopes on my threshold. I installed a camera inside the spyhole, then another one. They detected different people, both men and women, with scarves tied around their faces and hoods pulled over the eyes. The letters came from addresses belonging to my professors, other students of my year, as well as chance acquaintances. Like Laurie – the Laurie I had met at some party a month before; we had talked, but I didn’t know anything about her, besides her name. I swear I wouldn’t have remembered her if the letter didn’t say that it had been Halloween and that Laurie’s friend had tripped and spilled punch from a giant bowl all over us.  
The letters got through all the filters I was putting up; the sender knew everything about me – who I was sleeping with, what I was reading, what I did in the evening and what brand of tea I preferred. I managed to track his IP, but that gave me nothing on him. When he switched to paper letters, I started watching for him, getting up at night and early in the morning, but each time his postmen found a moment when I wasn’t watching. It was a proper bloody circus, I tell you. And it was getting more interesting day by day.  
I never liked poker. Never hit on girls who had already turned me down. Never beat a hard level in Halo after dozens of unsuccessful attempts. But when it came to challenges – the other kind of challenges, like this letter thing – I was the most venturous gambler in the world.  
Here and now my voice of reason is telling me that this was the problem all along.  
The player in me never knew when to stop – though player might not be the right word. He was more like a guy with a metal detector looking for sunken treasure at the bottom of the sea, or a historian trying to decipher the Rosetta stone.  
It took me five days to get caught up in the idea, and an hour to find out Raul Silva’s name, address, phone number, and even some references to a shady casino he had apparently owned at some point. Of course, I did call him.  
“Mr. Silva,” I said, “thanks for your letters.”  
There were two seconds of silence, and then he replied – as though he had expected me to call, as though there was no doubt I would call.  
“Ah, finally, Mr. Boothroyd,” he drawled out. “I think we should meet. Tomorrow at eight p.m.”  
I could have asked what the hell, I could have asked what had given him the idea that I would agree, and if the five days’ show was really necessary. But somehow I knew there would be no answer.  
Moreover, if that man wanted to meet me, he would do it anyway. He was invasive and seemingly resourceful. Then again, I never denied a challenge. I only asked:  
“Where?”  
I heard him laugh and promise that he himself would find me.

Silva was waiting for me at the Savoy, tan and broad-shouldered; his jacket cost more than a year’s worth of my scholarship. Imagine a 60-s movie villain, then add a broken nose, and that would be him. I remember him before he started to dye his hair, but his nose has always been broken.  
“How was your trip, mr. Boothroyd?” he asked, saluting me with a glass.  
“I wonder what kind of meeting it is, if your assistant had to drive me to London for it.”  
When Silva had said we would find me, of course I was suspicious. I had pinned a tiny spy camera to my tie and had warned my roommate (prompting a hundred of stupid questions), so I was ready to start an online broadcast if anything went wrong. Though I don’t think it would have been any help if anything had gone wrong. But I liked to be in control of at least something.  
“You’re impatient,” he said. “I was hoping for a pleasant talk in a favourable atmosphere. With champagne and great offers.  
“How did you find out about me?” I asked.  
Silva frowned pointedly.  
“I was also expecting better questions.”  
When he was frowning, his face looked like a big and ugly rubber mask. When he was smiling, it looked as if the mask had been cut with a knife, and teeth were showing through the hole, small and sharp, like an alligator’s. It seemed that things couldn’t get worse: I was sitting at the Savoy with a man who looked like a masked alligator, and this man not only knew everything about me, but also had offers for me.  
“All right,” I said. “Why so many letters? A couple would have sufficed.”  
“I had to…” Silva moved closer to me, as though to switch to a confidential whisper. “…to stir you up.”  
I looked at him closely, then looked at the vulgar gold Rolex on his wrist; in a few days he would throw this Rolex out, together with the other watches, rings, suits and terrible ties, and say that the masquerade at the Savoy had been only for my sake.   
“Did you want to pass yourself off as an eccentric millionaire?” I would ask.  
He would say:  
“No, I just wanted to look like an idiot. For the fun of it.”

I have no doubt: anyone who worked with Silva asked himself at some point: why the hell did I agree to that? I’ll tell you: he knew how to arouse everybody’s and anyone’s interest. If ideas were a disease like lepra, his mind was like a whole diseased quarter in an Indian town. He didn’t offer me a stable income; he knew it wasn’t so hard to find a job. He asked me:  
“Have you ever thought about your future? Surely, in a couple of years you will find a job. You have a dozen options right now. But tell me, is there a single interesting one among them?”  
I opened my mouth, but he interrupted me:  
“Of course not. Your big problem is that you’ll spread yourself too thin.”  
I put my glass away and adjusted my tie inconspicuously – or so I thought.  
“Look,” he said suddenly, “I’ll pretend not to notice this terrible bug. But you can do better than that. Right now you’re capable of hacking the Pentagon.”  
It was funny how calmly he was speaking of things like hacking the Pentagon – as if it was no big deal, like his great-aunt or her steak recipe. If anything, he toned his voice down a little bit.  
I felt like a fatty at a model casting, or a young scribble who has brought his typescript to the editor. I swear to God, I wanted to strangle Silva right there, in front of all these dolled-up women in furs, their fat husbands, somebody’s rich daughter and her boyfriend who looked like a stripper, and prim waiters.  
“Just look at you,” he smiled. “But of course, you can’t stand criticism, can you?”  
I pretended not to hear him.  
“Give me two days to think.”  
“One day,” he corrected me.  
Of course, the voice of reason was telling me to decline his offer. But Boothroyd the player had never listened to the voice of reason. Boothroyd the player was living in pursuit of ideas that were (or just seemed) big and important – and deep down, Boothroyd the player really thought he deserved better.  
So the next day, when Silva called to ask if I had made up my mind, I said:  
“It’s a deal. What exactly am I supposed to do?”


End file.
